Information technology infrastructure of a company, organization or other enterprise may process information in a common information model (CIM) format. CIM is an open standard that provides common definitions of management information for use by systems, networks, applications, services and other infrastructure elements. It allows for implementation of product vendor extensions based on the common definitions, so as to facilitate the exchange of semantically-rich management information between a wide variety of information technology infrastructure elements.
The CIM standard, established by the Distributed Management Task Force, includes Infrastructure Specification and Schema portions. The Schema provides the actual model descriptions, while the Infrastructure Specification defines the details for integration with other management models. See CIM Schema Version 2.29.0, May 3, 2011, and CIM Infrastructure Specification, Version 2.6, Mar. 31, 2010, both of which are incorporated by reference herein. The CIM Schema is a conceptual schema which defines the specific set of objects and relationships between them that represent a common base for the managed elements in an information technology environment.
In accordance with the CIM standard, managed elements of the information technology infrastructure, including computer systems, operating systems, storage systems and middleware, are represented using a common set of objects as well as relationships between the objects. However, infrastructure product vendors may provide implementations of CIM in a variety of different forms. For example, each of these vendors may implement a different type of vendor-specific CIM indication services. This can create difficulties for product customers that attempt to integrate their own third-party management tools and other applications with one or more of the vendor-specific CIM indication services.
Accordingly, integration of products that include vendor-specific CIM indication services is particularly challenging under conventional practice, and can lead to excessive product integration costs. The situation is further complicated by the fact that an increasing number of enterprises are migrating portions of their information technology infrastructure to cloud service providers.